Spotlight

Ike’s Other War

Oval Office books are selling well this season, what with The Presidents Club, Killing Lincoln, the two Obamas (Barack Obama and The Amateur), and the fourth (or is it the seventh—and we say that with affection!) volume of Robert Caro’s take on L.B.J. But are we ready for a bio of Dwight Eisenhower, the low-key, mild-mannered fumbler of words who is best remembered for what he accomplished on a certain June day in 1944? We are if the book is Ike’s Bluff (Little, Brown), by Evan Thomas, a five-star biographer (of Robert Kennedy, among others), who blows apart that image with devastating detail. Eisenhower was cranky and had a raging temper, especially on the golf course, but all that can be forgiven because, Thomas argues, Ike outfoxed the Soviet Union and China by making them believe he would use nuclear weapons while at the same time slapping down those in the Pentagon in thrall to a first strike. “Ike used the bluff of a big war—a nuclear war—to avoid getting into little wars,” Thomas says. The effort sapped Ike’s health (to the point where he cursed his doctors for encouraging a second term) but kept the world from blowing itself up. A Harvard graduate (and grandson of Norman Thomas, the six-time Socialist Party candidate for president), Thomas honed his narrative style at Time and Newsweek, where he covered Reagan, Bush, and Clinton. Quite the achievement, then, that the president he captures so well is one he never met. “Dad was a hard man to know,” says John S. D. Eisenhower, who just turned 90. “But the balance that Thomas achieves between Eisenhower the public servant and Eisenhower the man is, in my opinion, as close to the mark as we are likely to see.”